Dr. Thom Mayer

homes blown out of their apartments in the middle of the night, having to get on a train and go 900 miles west and hope someone would be there to take care of them. But you see, it's hard not to think about what kind of mentality results in men doing that. I think your point is extremely well taken. That authoritarian way of dealing with things does not, in my opinion, have the right results.

homes blown out of their apartments in the middle of the night, having to get on a train and go 900 miles west and hope someone would be there to take care of them. But you see, it's hard not to think about what kind of mentality results in men doing that. I think your point is extremely well taken. That authoritarian way of dealing with things does not, in my opinion, have the right results.

No. No.

No. No.

You fly in and you think, oh my God, these are the gates of hell. I mean, you see the Pentagon of all things burning. Couldn't even see that there was any remnants of a plane and the Southwest wall was completely on fire. But the gates of hell take you to some pretty interesting places.

Well, I grew up in a small town, Indiana, Midwestern, classic Midwest way to be raised. One of those factory towns that feeds or fed General Motors, 70 miles northeast of Indianapolis. And a football player, a lot of people play football in order to go to college. I went to college in order to continue playing football. And

you know dreams of playing in the nfl and aside from i did play in college uh was a all-conference linebacker and you know the old saying as you know the longer ago we played the better we were did have a chance i'd broken my leg my or i didn't break it somebody broke it for me in my junior year a pretty bad fracture so i couldn't play my senior year

But I was invited to training camps with the Vikings and the Bears and thought, hey, let's give this a shot. And discovered that, what did they tell me? They said, aside from my side speed, strength, and talent, they said I had no talent. Other than that, I would have been a perfect linebacker in the NFL. So- How nice.

Yeah, decided to go to, I was in at Duke's Medical School and I thought no matter how nasty the professors at Duke were, they couldn't be any worse than the guys trying to take my head off with the Vikings and the Bears. So became an emergency physician.

I trained in surgery at Salt Lake City and we worked a deal out so that the surgical residents covered the park doctor role at Yellowstone National Park. Wow. And we've been going back ever since. So 25 years ago, we we bit the bullet and bought a place and have enjoyed it ever since. It's still a small town atmosphere. A lot more people have moved in from other places, but we love it.

Well, I was actually a theology major when I was in college. And it wasn't that I was particularly cerebral or reflective. It was because you didn't have to take tests. You just wrote papers.

At the end of my sophomore year, my two professors, my theology professor and a biology professor, his name was Dr. Prey, you can't make that stuff up, said, have you ever thought about going into medicine instead of being a theology professor? After Duke, I was very clear I wanted to go west. I decided I was either going to go to Colorado or Utah. So I ranked Salt Lake number one and loved it.

Met my wife Maureen there. She was a newborn ICU flight nurse. I was a pediatric trauma fellow. Just a magical series of serendipitous circumstances.

People ask me all the time, how do I build my resume to get a job like yours as the medical director of the NFL Players Association? And my answer is, I became the medical director on August 1st, 2001. Corey Stringer, a tackle for the Vikings, died inexplicably of heat stroke. And I got a phone call. The phone call was from Gene Upshaw, then the executive director of the NFLPA.

And he called me not because he had done a resume search, but he called me because we were best friends. And we were best friends because his youngest and my youngest were best friends. Our families had had countless dinners. We coached tee ball together. We coached football together. And so he called me because he knew me and he trusted me.

So I always tell people, don't build resumes, build relationships. And I think that's the key, particularly as we move forward. And so I've been doing that for the last 23 plus years. And it's been an honor and a privilege to be a part of guiding the health and safety of our 2,500 players per year.

You know, when our boys were younger, I used to take them to school every day I was in town. When I dropped them off, I always said precisely the same thing. One more step in the journey of discovering where your deep joy intersects the world's deep needs. I swear I said this to them. You have to start with your deep joy, not the world's deep needs. The world's There's no bottom to that well.

But if you start with your deep joy, with passion that drives you, why you do what you do. And that has been a constant in the job because, you know, Lord Acton said, as you know, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. NFL is now, was then in 2001. the most powerful sports organization in their business in the world.

And keeping in mind that the deep joy of representing the health and safety needs of our 2,500 player patients, that's not the same interest as the NFL, which represents the interest of 32 billionaires who are the owners of the clubs. And so, you know, you just have to be willing to stay constant to that.

It was true in the concussion crisis when we recognized there was a problem that had to be fixed. We, the NFLPA, Sean Sansevieria, our attorney at the time, and I wrote the original concussion protocols. And there was significant pushback from the NFL, different commissioner and different medical director and chair of what was then called the MTBI committee. We stayed constant to that.